Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

Water pricked his face; when he looked up, he could see a foggy halo around the lights far overhead. The path ended abruptly in a waist-high wall of fake stone—he felt it, and was sure it was molded. A path ran beside the wall to rustic fake-stone steps to his left. Below . . . below was more garden, and one enormous tree rising up past him to end fifteen meters over his head. Behind it, a rough-looking gray wall with patches of blurred white, on which someone was splayed out as if for sacrifice: arms wide, legs stretched apart. As he watched, someone laughed, far below, and the figure heaved upward, lost its grip, and fell.

Vokrais watched the fall, waiting for the satisfying thunk, but instead the climber jerked to a halt in midair, and hung swinging. Now he could see the thin line, looped far above and coming back to the hand of someone standing beside the wall.

He started down the steps. Were the Fleet planners finally schooling their troops in hostile boarding techniques? But if so, why not have them in the gear they’d need? Why practice in thin short pants and little raglike shirts?

From the garden on Deck 16, he ran down one of the sets of stairs—stairs in stairwells, as in a building, not ladders as in a real ship—to Deck 14, then went out on the main curved passage again to catch the drop tube down to Deck 6. He could have used the access shaft itself, checking it out as he came, but he was eager to see how many people Hoch had collected.

When he came through the hatch, he saw nothing at first, which was what he expected to see. Above and below, the shaft seemed empty, a smudged gray tube with a spiral ladder curling around bundled cables and pipes in the middle. Vokrais grinned, noting where lights had burnt out in helpful places, and whistled a few notes.

His pack reappeared, one after another moving out of the shadows, out of hatches that opened into other access tunnels, out of whatever cover they’d found. One by one they came up or down the ladder to cluster near him. One, three, four, six, ten . . . plus himself and Hoch. Twelve only, and not enough. He scowled at Hoch.

“Is this all?”

“No . . . but all who could come safely right now. Three more coming, when they can slip away. Sramet saw Pilan and Vrodik, but couldn’t speak to them long enough. Geller is the only one nobody’s seen or reported on.”

“Who has weapons?” he asked, pulling out the knife and fork he’d taken.

“They don’t carry weapons,” Sramet said, sounding disgusted. “Not even the ones with Weapons Systems patches.”

Two others had stolen dinner knives; Brolt had already started to sharpen his to a stabbing point.

“The contractors?”

“They’re here,” Hoch said. “But we haven’t contacted them yet.”

“So we don’t know about the mechanism.” Vokrais thought a moment. “It would be better to find out for ourselves, without asking them. I don’t trust them.” His distrust had brought them all here; he had argued, successfully, that even if the scum were honest, they might panic and undo the job once they realized their own necks were in danger. Later his plan had expanded; if they were quick enough, his warband would have the entire glory to themselves, the richest capture in the history of the Bloodhorde.

“We could take them . . . we could make sure they did it right.”

Vokrais grinned. “We do need a few hostages.”

“They won’t care—” Hoch said. The Bloodhorde didn’t. Anyone careless enough to get caught was worthless; even if he escaped later, he wouldn’t be trusted again for a long time.

“Familias is different. Besides, we need some of their technical tricks. We’re supposed to know how to do things we don’t understand.” They nodded; they’d all found that out in only the few hours. Astounding that a warship crew, even down to the fewest of stripes, would be expected to understand all the gadgetry . . . but so it had proved. Only the fact that they’d been gassed, and assumed to have residual problems from that, had kept them from being discovered simply by their ignorance. “If we get one of the right family, it’ll slow ’em down. They’ll stop to think about it; they’ll try a rescue. Then we get more.”

“So you want us to pick certain needles out of a stack of thousands?”

“If they come handy. Here—shove that wand into the ’port and let’s get a crew list.” It was a blue—and-green ringed port, he noticed. Hoch put his wand in, and information appeared in little glowing letters, projected on the air itself.

At first, the long list of names meant nothing. Then Vokrais remembered the Familias habit of putting organizational charts on the system, and figured out the right code to ask for. “We want someone in scan, so they can tell us how to disable their miserable systems without blowing them away,” Hoch said.

“The question is, do we want someone on the ship’s crew, someone from the schools division, or the heavy maintenance division?”

“Heavy maintenance,” Vokrais decided. “From what I heard, they’ve made all sorts of modifications to the original ship’s architecture . . . the crew may not know about it, but those in maintenance will.”

In a few minutes, they had a list of personnel assigned to Remote Sensing, 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard. “Commander Vorhes,” Vokrais muttered. “That won’t work—he’ll be surrounded by people all the time. Lieutenant Bondal . . . Ensign Serrano . . .” He looked up, grinning. “Serrano. Wasn’t that the bitch who caused us trouble at Xavier?”

“And an important Fleet family. Even though he’s only an ensign, that’ll make them take notice.”

“If he knows enough,” Hoch said. “He’s only an ensign. The lieutenant I found in Hull and Architecture isn’t an expert . . . the junior officers can be sent here for short runs.”

“If he doesn’t know enough, we can snatch another from scan—the family connection alone will be useful.”

“Hostage or vengeance?”

“Well . . . we tell them it’s a hostage.” Another low chuckle; they understood that. This Serrano cub would go back to his family—if he did—toothless and tamed, a warning not to interfere with Bloodhorde nobles. “Now—have you all used the mapping function on these things?”

Heads shook, and Vokrais glared at them. They’d come for the technology; they should be learning to use it. The data wands weren’t difficult. He put his own in the port this time, telling them about the fast and slow ports as if he’d known all along. Then he switched to the open display, and the ship graphics glowed before them.

“We need a higher access probe to find everything we want,” he said. “So we need to kill someone in ship security—with lots of stripes—and use theirs. But here you can see . . .” He pointed out the bridge, the secondary command center tucked in between the two FTL drives, the medical decks and the ship security offices on T-5. “They’ll have weapons in security—even these sheep must run amok sometimes—and if we knock out their security personnel, we’ve eliminated resistance.” All that counted, all that knew how to fight in any organized way. “In medical, they’ll have more of that sleepygas, and the antidotes—”

“Eye for eye,” murmured Hoch, grinning. Bloodhorde tradition, to return insults as exactly as possible, before the final bloodletting.

The loud blat-blat-blat of some alarm made them all look around. Then the muffled voice that must be a transmitted announcement. Hoch stuck his data wand back in the ’port, this time choosing the faster display, which only the user could see.

“They caught on,” he said after a moment. “They’re pulling everyone in for identification checks, full-scale . . . whatever that means.” Vokrais was impressed. After that sloppy beginning, he’d expected to have days to wander around unnoticed before being found out. But this was better. He grinned at his pack.